


By any outward touch

by twofrontteethstillcrooked



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-14
Updated: 2012-09-14
Packaged: 2017-11-14 05:55:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofrontteethstillcrooked/pseuds/twofrontteethstillcrooked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are still in there, brother, he thought. You are not lost.</p>
<p>"Just breathe, Thor," Natasha said, but he couldn't, not until he knew he would not drown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By any outward touch

**Author's Note:**

> Endless thanks to hesychasm and zarahemla for amazing beta reading and story wrangling services.

In the wash of blue he was held perfectly still, bound and weightless while the soft light whispered.

A memory unspooled. He was kneeling at the edge of the shattered bifrost. His eyes burned like he was looking through warm blue water toward too bright sunshine. He could not understand what had happened. It had not happened. It was just a prank, a spell, a jest, and soon he would laugh. His sore empty hands seemed as pale and unfamiliar as if they belonged to someone else.

When he opened his eyes he saw tendrils trailing along his limbs, blue fading as it left like water dribbling away, no mark on him anywhere.

The cave was dim and damp, limestone rough and chill at his back. Pounding footsteps grew louder. A woman shouted "Over here," and torch light staggered over the rocky walls, illuminating the crags and part of the corner where Thor sat. It should have made him feel warmer, he thought, or reassured to sense the fire wielded by allies coming nearer.

One last weep of blue trickled off into a crevice and disappeared. For a beat Thor thought it gone, but became aware of a hush at the rim of his hearing, a seashell echo, and words forming unbidden.

Your brother never loved you at all.

"Thor?" someone said from far away. She sounded worried.

He hurt with cold like he'd been swimming against a half frozen current or climbing an outcropping in Jotunheim. His brother's hand had been in his for at least the span of a pitiful average human life -- the bones creaked, snapped, and he did not have the strength to readjust the grip, he was going to have to let go, he could not let go, the skin was tearing, his wrist was breaking.

No, no, wake up. That wasn't how it happened. You know this. Your brother did not catch your hand.

"Hold on," and a blanket was being wrapped around his shoulders. He saw one of those flameless torches, a knapsack thrown down with a thunk, heard a tinny noise emanating from an electronic device and suddenly everyone talking, crowding in now, bringing the smell of rain and sweat and damp wool.

He had reached for him, and there was the staff, but his brother was not close enough. Everything had slipped, everything had fallen away into the infinite starlight beneath them. He had not caught his brother's hand. 

"God, no, don't touch it with your bare hands, are you kidding me? We brought the tongs, use the tongs." Stark, maybe, or Barton, addressing the tiny voice in the phone.

Ice curled inside Thor; the blue became stained with smooth serpentine green.

Why deny yourself? Is not your rage every bit my equal, now more than ever? What is a warmonger but a murderer succeeding on a larger scale, and oh how splendid your proficiency. 

Do you no longer recognize poisonous dreams yourself, do you not understand what I will have to do to be rid of you? Fight me. Have you not always been the stronger? Prove yourself. Can you not taste the assurance? The charge building in your veins, the song rising in Mjölnir, that power magnified a million times. You alone could rule every realm, conqueror, it would be better, it will be better. 

You should not forgive me, and I will not forgive you. And when you are soon king and I am vanquished, you won't even miss me. 

Green thawed to blue. Shake it off, it is not real. It is not him. Wake up.

"Over here," a voice repeated. She sounded upset but in a controlled way. 

"You weren't with him?" Rogers. That had to be Rogers.

"We split up." Familiar, her voice. Matter of fact. 

"Looks like he's in shock," Stark -- it was probably Stark -- said.

Someone else said, apprehensively, "Can that happen to these guys?"

No one answered, and then Natasha's face was in front of his. She was squatting down to look right into Thor's eyes, her expression skillfully blank, but the pale fine hairs near her jaw were wet with perspiration; she was breathing hard. What she saw made her take his right wrist and slide a palm against his gently, before she glanced over at whoever else was standing there.

"We need to get him out of here." As quiet as the touch. 

Agitated yells rose up behind Natasha. "Come on," she said, tugging at Thor until something in his body reacted. He stood up, pushed away from the wall, and as she looked up at him her mouth quirked with the smallest hint of amusement at their usual height discrepancy. 

"You're going to be okay," she said. 

Banner ran along side her and slipped a black duffel bag up her arm. "They're calling for me," he said to Natasha before jogging out after Agent Wise.

Thor shook his head, trying to feel his way through the murky blue crouching heavy in his mind. He wondered when Banner had joined the others. Rogers was picking up the blanket. Near the mouth of the cave Stark was adjusting a piece of his armor; Barton waved a number of suited-up agents out into another corridor. Coulson sounded abnormally frustrated, giving orders about not dropping the containment case for the love of Lockjaw, did they not get what was in there?

Thor saw a flash of silver as the box snapped shut and was hauled up and lugged away by two soldiers.

Someone said, "The radiation signature..."

The conversation segued into another as someone else walked past. "...the last explosion?"

"...seriously, if this isn't the Chitauri, who..."

"Whoa, must've got his bell rung..."

"Why would they leave the tesseract behind, anyway?"

Someone else, and someone else. "A lot of blood, I mean, a lot." "Not confident it was human. How much blood can someone who isn't human lose, anyway?" "But no bodies recovered?" 

Thor wasn't sure he remained standing. The floor seemed very near. Natasha placed a hand on his left elbow and the cavern sluggishly righted itself.

She touched her ear, listening. "Copy that. Hill says they've located them. Fewer than forty, they think, but they can't tell what kind of ammunition they've brought."

"Call it, Cap," Stark said. They'd moved together into team formation. 

"Once more: anyone with objections to the mission, now's the time to speak up," Rogers said. "Clint?"

Barton was counting arrows. "I'm good," he said, tone dry.

"This hasn't really changed anything," Natasha pointed out.

"Except reiterate how high the stakes are," Rogers said.

"And we don't know for certain he's not in on it," Stark added. 

"Probably is," Barton said, voice still flat. "But we worry about that later, after the situation has been stabilized." 

"Neutralized," Stark said.

There was a lull where they all glanced at Thor simultaneously and looked away with four separate expressions of something like sympathy.

"Captain," Coulson said, and it probably alluded to five or six different scenarios, instructions, and concerns Thor had missed in the few minutes he'd been apart from the group. Stark said "Banner" in much the same way and wherever the doctor was he apparently had news to share from his end. Rogers gestured at an agent Thor had only met in passing, and she brought over a tablet. 

"If you have to recalibrate him, you know, like you did me." Barton was talking to Natasha so quietly Thor almost did not hear him. "I'm not saying you can't knock him unconscious, but." He paused. "Besides, I kinda know what he's maybe going through." 

"Yes, you do. Which is why today it can be somebody else's problem," Natasha said. 

"Yours?" Barton asked, sounding unconvinced. She gave him a very level look. He glanced away and then back at her. "Okay. Okay. But call if you need to." She nodded slightly.

Another time, Thor thought, he would have to ponder the tones of voice those two used exclusively on each other.

For now, he struggled to think what his initial orders had been when they'd entered the cave in pursuit of the tesseract. He did not like not being able to focus, to pick up the thread of what was happening, exhausted in a way he had not felt since the days after Loki first--

He blinked: your brother never loved you. 

(So if he is dead now, it does not matter. Mourn if you must, and forget.)

He was too heavy, the water was too heavy, he sank into the murmuring blue like Mjölnir herself were powering his descent. 

"Thor," Natasha said. It seemed like she was on the other side of the water, up where there was air. 

"What?" Rogers said, and Stark said, "Shit," and Barton was grabbing Thor's waist. 

Natasha said, "We've got you, Thor," her words crisscrossed by Coulson saying, "Don't let him sit on the tech--"

"Fifty bucks says someone set that thing in his path on purpose," Stark offered.

"Fifty bucks says we all know who that someone is," Barton muttered.

"Guys," Rogers said, with the 'not now' unspoken.

_Please, please, leave. The practiced indifference in Loki's voice shifted to something desperate. Why will you not leave._

"Go on," Natasha was telling the others. "He's going to need another minute."

_Because we are kin, you and I; we will carry this together. And I will not leave._

_The bleak wrecked light in Loki's eyes changed; he looked upon Thor as though he had not honestly believed a single one of his entreaties before. The loneliness there, the bare startled need, made Thor's throat ache._

_You are still in there, brother, he thought. You are not lost._

"Just breathe, Thor," Natasha said, but he couldn't, not until he knew he would not drown. 

When he opened his eyes the next time, the bustle of the team and supporting agents had moved off. Thor doubted he and Natasha had been alone in the cave more than three minutes. She was not demonstrably impatient; in her way, she used patience like a weapon. If they were running short of time or if she thought him too addled to be eventually useful, she would have said so. 

He was failing the team, though. His brother was missing (only missing, only fallen, only as ever out of reach) under extremely precarious circumstances that portended nothing comforting. Thor needed to wake up.

How long had it been since he'd spoken aloud? "It told me," he began to say, in a ruined voice he scarcely recognized as his own. 

Your whole remembered life-- 

Because he truly did not remember himself in the time before Loki had been born (had been stolen) (had been salvaged) (had been placed squirming in Frigg's arms as her mouth trembled, and she'd knelt to let Thor, tugging at her skirt, peer at the baby. Thor touched Loki's small, very small and warm hand, and the little hand opened like a star)-- 

Nearly your whole life was false. You and your brother were myths meant to scare, barely worth the sum of your father's obfuscations and thefts, your mother's silence.

You never loved him either.

White-blue heat roared in his brain. He felt it like lightning striking, saw one tree and another unravel into flame until an entire forest was howling with fire. The taste of ash in his mouth. 

You should have fallen too.

"No," Natasha said, and the fierceness of the word, the way she spit it, startled him. Had he said something else out loud? "You might think it answers your questions, or your prayers." She wiped at her forehead. "Or your equivalent of prayers. You knew what was true before. You have to let this go." 

A breath rushed into his lungs and Thor lunged to his feet again. He wielded Mjölnir as effortlessly as though he'd conjured her from naught, and since he didn't know where the hammer had been a minute ago, possibly he had.

"Hey," Natasha said, catching up to him when he was halfway to the cave's exit. She jammed a magazine into her gun and tucked the weapon in its holster. They walked faster. Outside the cave the forest was smeared with fog but to Thor it still felt relieving to be out of the closer dankness. 

A team leader waved them onto a muddy jeep. The vehicle lurched away, smacking through low maple branches that scattered leaves over them. He picked a yellow one from his hair and Natasha threw a handful out into the breeze. 

He looked at her. If any part of this mission perturbed her, particularly the part where all indications were another attack from a different and deadlier force was impending, her demeanor betrayed no distress. He took a moment to simply be glad she was with him.

"Know what we forgot to do?" Natasha asked. "Get you another ear piece." 

Thor didn't recall taking the first one out but when he'd reached the cavern where the tesseract sat on the ground, appearing as harmless and dull gray as a river rock and like someone had tossed it there unthinking... He didn't know.

"The diagnostics have just started, but Banner is pretty certain-- What you stumbled across, he doesn't think it's the first tesseract. It's _a_ tesseract. An additional tesseract. Not the one we dredged out of the ocean."

Thor frowned. "The one from Asgard's vault, the one taken when Loki was--"

"It's still missing." Natasha gave him a look he could not begin to interpret.

In a briefing once, Director Fury said, "Doors open from both sides." The man had gestured to Barton, which Thor assumed meant the comment had originally been Barton's. The observation made much sense, but how many doors were there, Thor wondered. How many sides?

Natasha found a bottle of water in a compartment under the jeep's rear cabin window. She twisted off the cap and handed it to him. Thirst welled up in him and he drained the liter.

She observed him steadily and he tried not to fidget. She was waiting for him to tell her, he realized, because she somehow knew he needed to tell someone.

"Trusting what it said was very easy," Thor said, wishing to explain. 

"Yeah, it's helpful that way," Natasha said, calmly sarcastic.

He thought about what she might have felt trying to shut down the portal on top of Stark's tower those months ago, when she brandished the Chitaurian scepter Loki had brought with him. When she had fought a tesseract herself. Thor was not brave enough to inquire. Even beyond Loki's control of Barton and Selvig -- and Thor's admiration for Barton's fortitude was mounting -- the rest of the team had been affected just by the presence of the scepter's stone, though not to this degree. 

At least, this felt different. Worse, he thought. Much worse.

"It amazes me," Natasha said. "Somebody or something created the tesseracts because, what? They thought it sounded like a good idea at the time?" She smiled a sad little smile. "But you listen to one of the cubes for a few milliseconds. It sizes you up, you are so simple compared to it, it takes nothing to comprehend you. And you want to believe."

You would be free, and you would be king. Once you craved the weight of the crown much the way a starving man might hallucinate a single bite of apple. Don't you desire what has always been rightfully yours, and only yours? Most of your life has been one long intricate deception; you needn't bother forgiving your brother. He let go. He fell, and cannot be saved.

"Thor," Natasha said, eyes sharp, "the tesseract _lied_ to you. Maybe not about everything. But enough." 

She said it with enough quiet authority to make him think she had unfortunately had to endure more from the tesseract -- and liars in general, considering what little he knew of her pre-SHIELD existence -- than he could guess.

How long had Loki borne the hissing blue promises? Which lies or threats had he believed willingly or told in kind? 

With intense self control Thor did not touch the handle of the hammer at his side. Who he intended to harm he could not say. 

The jagged crimson edge of the feeling passed gradually; when he looked at his palms upturned in his lap it seemed they should have been flayed to bone.

Bouncing over a series of tree roots, the jeep clattered like it was in danger of disintegrating. Thor clamped his back teeth together and tried to imitate Natasha's nonchalant tolerance for mortal means of transportation. 

She was listening to the wireless chatter again. She looked satisfied with what she heard. "Banner says to tell you they've confirmed Loki's alive," she said. 

His throat felt raw. Thor knew suddenly this campaign unfolding would not be like those already fought. 

"Has..." Thor grappled with the proper phrasing. "Does SHIELD still think Loki orchestrated his own abduction?" He hated to have to ask. 

She hesitated. "There are a couple of theories being discussed." She bit her lip and continued.  
"He wouldn't admit it but I think even Clint is starting to agree, the way the last twenty-four hours have gone down, it's getting harder to imagine Loki somehow set all this in motion from a well guarded prison in another realm. There are just too many moving parts."

And if it wasn't Loki, the larger implications were growing more exponentially frightening.

"That isn't to say Loki's not involved," Natasha posited. "Only that judgment is being reserved pending further developments."

Thor stifled a sigh. His brother was ever a series of contradictions, and long past innocence. Were not they all, to some degree? But Thor could not allow himself to think it meant Loki could not redeem himself, if given the chance. 

"When our father first sent me back," he said, "I saw, I begged Loki to come home." He swallowed past the pain of the last syllable. 

It seemed strange and awkward to speak on this, but he had to, if only so someday Natasha could tell the others, and she would be fair, he knew. If she told them, his actions might not appear so alien to them, so naive or traitorous.

"My brother is a most talented trickster, and has conjured far worse than hoaxes. But I know without question what I have seen in him multiple times; he may not know how plainly he has been revealed." 

The fear Thor had seen in Loki's eyes, the hopelessness he could not abandon him to.

"He lies, I believe, more to himself than anyone." He held Natasha's gaze. "But I remember who he used to be. I cannot but hope--" 

He stopped, focused for a second on taking a breath.

"Whatever else either of us have been or are, have done or will do, Loki is not the only one who needs to make amends. I have responsibilities too, and I cannot be someone else.

"The past cannot be altered. Another war comes. The months I thought my brother dead--"

He thought he might never have enough courage to say how he had grieved then. 

And though he knew fully how terrible Loki's trespasses against Midgard were, even in the midst of combat Thor had felt a piercing relief despite everything, and felt it thrumming in his veins now: Loki was alive. 

"But my brother is not dead. Not yet lost. Neither am I lost."

Natasha's eyes had not left his face and she nodded like he'd regaled her with a lengthy monologue. Perhaps in his way he had.

The jeep was slowing down, taking a narrow turn between pine trees. 

"'Got his bell rung,' this is a Midgardian euphemism?" 

Natasha worked to avoid an outright grin and gave a hum. "Like dazed or knocked out."

"Ah. It was very appropriate given the chiming in my head." He also made a small show of not grinning.

"I bet." 

"Thank you for letting me...gather myself." He was grateful for Natasha's -- well, for Natasha.

"You're welcome," she said simply. 

He was awake, finally pulling clear of the webs the tesseract had threaded through his mind. Indeed, he had not sensed such power in his blood in an age. He flexed his hands. Mjölnir was waiting for him; he could sense her hunger for battle and found his own matched it.

Natasha said, "We're almost there."

She cocked her chin, like she was mulling what to say next. The barricade across a clearing at the tree line was coming into view. Their friends were circling into position.

His expression must have mollified her because there was mild humor in her tone. "You remember what we're fighting for, right?"

Among other things? he thought. The truth.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from John Milton: "Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam."


End file.
